Media Moguls

According to a study conducted in late April by the U.S. Department of Education and the National Institute of Literacy, 32 million adults in the U.S. can't read. That's 14 percent of the population. 21 percent of adults in the U.S. read below a 5th grade level, and 19 percent of high school graduates can't read.

The current literacy rate isn't any better than it was 10 years ago

According to the Department of Justice, "The link between academic failure and delinquency, violence, and crime is welded to reading failure." The stats back up this claim: 85 percent of all juveniles who interface with the juvenile court system are functionally illiterate, and over 70 percent of inmates in America's prisons cannot read above a fourth grade level, according to BeginToRead.com.

nearly all Internet surfing and social networking is text-based, how can this be true? Is this true for today’s teens, or this data more reflective of teens from previous decades with less (or no) Internet access?

The NEA makes a convincing case that both kids and adults are reading fewer books. "Non-required" reading - ie, picking up a book for the fun of it - is down 7% since 1992 for all adults, and 12% for 18-24 year olds

Comparable non-events appear when you look at prose literacy levels in the adult population: in 1992, 43% of Americans read at an intermediate level; by 2003 the number was slightly higher at 44%. "Proficient" readers dropped slightly, from 15% to 13%.

novel readers may have declined by 10%, but the number of bloggers has gone from zero to 25 million.

Survey of 35,000 pupils finds majority of youngsters now read on screenebooks also reducing the number of children who enjoy reading as a pastime 'Children who only read on-screen are significantly less likely to enjoy reading and less likely to be strong readers', National Literacy Trust says

The poll of 34,910 young people aged between eight and 16 across the UK found that those who read printed texts were almost twice as likely to have above-average reading skills as those who read on screens every day.

Worryingly, only 12 per cent of those who read using new technology said they really enjoyed reading, compared with 51 per cent of those who favoured books.

Little or no grammar teaching, cell phone texting, social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, are all being blamed for an increasingly unacceptable number of post-secondary students who can't write.

The Internet norm of ignoring punctuation and capitalization as well as using emoticons may be acceptable in an e-mail to friends and family, but it can have a deadly effect on one's career if used at work.

Cellphone texting and social networking on Internet sites are degrading writing skills, say even experts in the field.

My audacious idea is to use television to help children learn their letters and, maybe, even to read.  This may be a surprising suggestion given that TV is cited as a main reason for the decline in children’s reading.

Obama (2008) in his speech pinpointed that children cannot achieve unless they raise their expectations and turn off television sets. Shabi and Udofia (2009) noted that active learning from books is better than passive learning such as watching televisions and playing games.

As technology has played a bigger role in our lives, our skills in critical thinking and analysis have declined, while our visual skills have improved, according to psychological research.

"Studies show that reading develops imagination, induction, reflection and critical thinking, as well as vocabulary," Greenfield said. "Reading for pleasure is the key to developing these skills. Students today have more visual literacy and less print literacy. Many students do not read for pleasure and have not for decades."

In Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (2009), he notes, “The illiterate, the semiliterate, and those who live as though they are illiterate are effectively cut off from the past. They live in an eternal present.”

Movement of People The initial formation of these civilizations is based on the movement of peoples into the river valleys and plains. These people were nurtured by these spaces. They often described their environments as god-like and characterized their nearby rivers as life-giving. The transformation of these valleys and plains into to places capable of physically nurturing the various peoples who moved into them was one of the first acts of cultural innovation and exchange. A simple illustration of this exchange is seen in the technologies of food production. The types of food in a region, where the food could be grown, and, under what conditions, all gave rise to innovation.